


First Contact

by mieraspeller



Series: Arranged Marriage AU [1]
Category: The 100
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Interrogation, Kidnapping, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-06-18
Packaged: 2018-04-05 00:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4158681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mieraspeller/pseuds/mieraspeller
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wells Jaha lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	First Contact

Day 5 AD

 

Wells shivers in his thin jacket as he keeps watch. Snow started falling a few minutes ago and he thinks he'll need to change watch with someone soon, to avoid frostbite if for no other reason. Footsteps sound quietly from the camp behind him and he looks up to see the youngest kid in camp, Charlotte, approaching.

"Hi." Her voice is quiet and Wells smiles reassuringly at her.

"Couldn't sleep?" he asks.

"I-I never can. You on watch?"

"Join me." He dusts the fresh coat of snow off the fallen tree and Charlotte gingerly sits down.

"I had a nightmare."

"Hmm." He stays quiet as she continues. She looks like she just needs someone to listen, and it hits him anew that she's just a kid. She shouldn't have to deal with all this. 

"I-I have them every night. But... I think I found a way to make them stop."

There's a noise off to the side and Wells glances over quickly to check it out.

“I'm-” Charlotte starts to say, and then there’s a woosh of air, and she’s gone. Wells tries to shout, but his mouth is covered and then everything goes dark. 

 

 

He wakes briefly, and his wrists are tied and he’s been slung over something warm, tall, and moving. He gets a glance down, sees hooves - and then someone shouts, and pain - 

 

 

When he wakes, he’s still in the dark. He’s on something that crackles when he moves -- leaves, by the feel. Leaning against something hard and straight, with regular grooves that his traces with a finger to find make some kind of grid on the wall. He doesn’t move more than that at first, listens and looks as his eyes take their time to adjust enough to make out a dim outline of a person a few feet away. He can hear voices, faintly, smell smoke and mildew and damp. When he looks up, he can see stars, and his vision swims. 

“Are you awake?” a small voice asks. It sounds like Charlotte. He looks back over at the person across from him and after a moment she coalesces into a recognizable form. 

“Wha' happened?” he asks, as quietly as he can manage. It’s hard to form words, and he can feel himself slurring. Now that the shock is wearing off, his head is pounding. 

“Monsters took us,” Charlotte says, sniffling. “It’s my fault, if I hadn’t…” she starts sobbing. 

“It’s okay, the others will find us. We’ll be fine.” 

That doesn’t seem to comfort her, as her sobs only grow louder. He tries to go to her, but he makes it to his knees before his head is spinning and he has to sit back down before he vomits. Wells tilts his head back against the wall, and recoils in shock when he sees the outline of a person looking down. The flickering light of a fire reflects off their face enough for him to see a beard -- a man. So they’re underground. That explains the smell. He tries to stay calm, rational, like his father taught him if he was ever kidnapped. (Living on the Ark didn’t mean that sort of thing was impossible, just harder. More likely he would end up dead.) It's hard when his head aches and he feels nauseated and dizzy, even sitting still.

The man moves away after a moment, and Wells breathes again. 

Charlotte is still crying, and since Wells can’t get close enough to comfort her physically, he tries talking to her, then singing her a song his mother sung to him before she died. He doesn’t remember half the words, but he hums what he can’t recall, and finally, Charlotte quiets. And from her breathing sounds to have fallen all the way into sleep. He’s thirsty and sore and his head feels like his brains have been scrambled.

He tries to stay awake, but he’s so tired... 

 

 

The time passes quickly, as he falls in and out of consciousness. He thinks once, that he must have a concussion, and then its another round of Charlotte crying, sometimes he would wake and there would be bread and water, and he was cold, and his head would ache, and then he would sleep. 

 

 

“Wells!” 

Wells jerks awake with a gasp. Cold water drips from his face and he rubs his eyes to clear them instinctively. He feels -- not great, but his head doesn’t feel like it’s splitting, and his vision is back to normal. Two people, a man and a woman, stand before him, lit by the sunlight coming through the grate above. They turn away after they see he is awake.

Monsters, he thinks he remembers Charlotte saying. Radiation poisoning certainly could have made whoever managed to survive on earth to look monstrous. But the people in front of him just look like people. People in need of a bath, haircut and a shave. Maybe not everyone? Or maybe they wore masks. He sighs, knowing the speculation was useless at best, and detrimental to his morale at worst. As much as he wants to be prepared, there isn’t anything he can do but wait as they confer amongst themselves.

“Chon yu bilaik? Haukom yu kamp raun hir?” the woman says to him finally, and Wells squints. It sounds almost like English, but not quite. Before he can says anything the man yells. 

“Chon yu kru?!” 

“Crew? I don’t understand. Tú hablas español? Français?” Wells says slowly. 

“Yu spichen,” he spits out.

“Gonaslang,” the first woman says contemptuously, turning. Wells watches as she swings open a metal gate. “Ai na ge heda.” 

The man paces back and forth and Wells pulls his feet in to keep them from getting stomped on. After a minute the man turns back to Wells with a glare. 

“Emo mounan,” the man snarls, pulling out a knife, and Charlotte screams. Wells tries to scramble away, but he's jerked back after a few feet. He twists around to face the man, realizing with a sinking feeling in his stomach that there’s some sort of cuff around his ankle, chaining him down. And he has nothing to defend himself against a knife.

“Hod op!” The gate slams open and a short dark haired girl, armored and armed, with a thick line of black over her eyes stands there with a furious expression on her face. “Gustus!” 

“Heda! Emo mounan --” 

“Gon we.” 

“Heda -” 

“Nau!” 

The man, Gustus, looks mutinous, but he finally goes. Wells shuffles back until he's stands against the wall, glancing helplessly down at Charlotte, curled up in on herself.

“Who are you?” the girl asks, looking at him coldly. “What clan are you from?” 

“I’m Wells. Wells Jaha. And we’re -- we’re from space,” Wells stammers out. His tongue still feels unwieldy, and his head like it is stuffed with cotton, but the adrenaline isn't helping him speak clearly either. “My people sent us down to see if we could live on the ground.” 

“Space?” the girl asks suspiciously. 

“Yes, like. The sky? We were in orbit in a space station called the Ark and --” she puts up a hand and he shuts up. 

“I have seen things fall from the sky with people in them. Broken people. They were smaller than what you came in.” 

Wells nods slowly. He’d heard those stories. “Yes. Those were smaller ships. Pods. For just one person. Ours had to be bigger, for more people.” 

“One hundred and one people.” She states, and Wells tries not to recoil in shock. “Is that all of your clan, Wells of the Sky People?” 

He looks at her and hopes that telling the truth isn’t going to get him and the rest of the kids killed. 

“No. There are over two thousand of us.” 

She pauses, glances at Charlotte, who has her knees tucked up against her, and her face half hidden behind her arms, then back at Wells. “Why did you come here?” 

“Our home is dying. We had to come, or we would die, too.” He tries to say it simply, not up to the task of explaining spaceships, and that they can run out of air. It seems hard to believe such a thing is possible even for him, down on the ground. 

“So your people will be following? Into our territory?” 

“We didn’t know that anyone lived on the ground!” Wells protests. 

“Answer.” 

“Yes. They’ll come because if they don’t, they’ll die.” 

“How many warriors?” 

He pauses and she takes a menacing step toward him. Despite her small stature, he feels a thread of terror pulling at his closed mouth. “Probably two hundred in the Guard. Maybe another thousand who are fit enough to fight and use a gun.” 

Her mouth tightens and she leaves without another word. 

 

 

Not long after a boy comes in with more bread and water, and a blanket each. 

Wells huddles under his blanket against the wall, as far from the grate as possible where gusts of freezing air keep circulating, while his mind runs in circles, trying to think what else he could have said, what she will do with that information, how he should have tried to get information about them in exchange. 

He’s still so tired, but he still doesn’t want to be caught unaware when their captors come back, so he sits back against the wall and goes over what he knows about the ground. 

Little, bordering on nothing, apparently. Nothing they learned in school prepared them for people living here. People that somehow managed to survive on Earth for the last 97 years. They use spears. They kidnapped him and a twelve year old girl. But they didn’t kill them, which means they either want leverage, or information. Or both. 

Probably both. 

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte says, interrupting his thoughts. Wells looks up at her, and the moonlight lights her face well enough to see she’s been crying again.

“No, it’s not your fault, Charlotte, we --” 

“Yes it is!” she yells. Wells stops, eyes widening as she continues. “Bellamy said to slay my demons, and I can’t sleep, I have nightmares every night since your father killed my parents, so I thought maybe if I killed you, they would stop and I could move on, like Clarke said I should try to do, but --” she whispering now, and Wells has to strain to hear her. “I don’t think it would have worked.” 

“I…” he stops, trying to think of what he should say to this little girl. The girl who apparently almost murdered him. “I think you would just have new nightmares,” he says finally. “Do you… still want to kill me?” 

“No!” Charlotte says, sounding half frantic. “No, you can’t die, too, everyone leaves me, and you can’t leave me!” 

“Okay, okay. I won’t leave you if I can help it,” he promises. Everything feels vaguely surreal as he reassures her, but when she smiles shakily at him, looking terrified and grateful, he smiles back, as genuinely as he can. 

 

 

That evening, they are moved into a new prison -- this time a small cabin. It is darker, with only one small window high up on the wall, but warmer than the place they were in before. He guesses that they were taken at least two days ago, based on what he can remember from his lucid periods. They got fed twice today, and only Wells is chained in the room. Charlotte is allowed to roam the small space, though the door is barred from the outside. She is still restless, though she gets let out once to use the bathroom, while Wells has to use a bucket in the corner. 

The girl -- their leader, if ‘heda’ means what he thinks it does and despite that she can’t be much older than he is -- unless the radiation on Earth has anti aging properties -- comes back before a full day in their new prison has passed, while Charlotte is out. 

“How soon until the rest of your people come?” she asks. Wells shrugs, trying to appear apologetic.

“I don’t know for sure. Probably no more than six months. Maybe sooner, depending on the Ark - our home.” Wells doesn’t see any point in lying -- she’ll find out the truth soon enough. “But my father wants what is best for our people, and I know he would want peace with you and yours.” 

She looks at him sharply. “Your father leads your people?” 

“Yes. Like I said, we didn’t know that there are people on the ground, but I think we could help each other - “ 

“Shut up.” 

Wells watches her silently, as she stands still, the only mar on her smooth face a slight furrow of her brow.

“This is our territory. We are surrounded by my allies, who hold their own territory. And by our enemies, who live in the mountain. There is no place for your people.” 

Wells swallows nervously. “As I said, we didn’t know that anyone survived the last war. If we could share your land -” 

Lexa lets out a derisive laugh. “My people fought and bled for our land. We still do. Why should we share?” 

“You said you have enemies who live here,” Wells says slowly, feeling through the idea as he speaks. Probably a terrible idea, but better than death. “If we could aid you, would that be reason enough to let us share your land, and your knowledge of the earth?” 

Wells tries not to squirm when she looks him over appraisingly. “Do you speak for your leader?” 

“I can’t speak for him, but if I could speak to him, then I think we can come to an agreement that benefits both our people.” 

“Would he agree to fight with us for peace between us, and for his son’s life?” Lexa asks shrewdly. 

Wells looks up at her. His father sent him to Earth, thinking that the radiation would kill them. He says, “For peace, maybe. But holding me hostage isn’t going to sway him to your side.” 

“You believe this. Your father must be a good leader.” 

Wells nods cautiously. 

“For your sake, I hope he lives up to your words.” She turns and bangs on the door, and it opens a second later. 

Wells stares at the closed door after Lexa leaves, and hopes Monty managed to make contact with the Ark. Or that Clarke and Bellamy are better at lying than he is. Otherwise, he may have just killed Clarke and the rest of the hundred.


End file.
